Solar Project: One week of stats!

On Tuesday March 13, we met up to assemble and install our solar project on the east facing windows on the ITP floor.

There was some concern that the circuit wouldn’t work, because when we connected the circuit (the Adafruit solar panels, the power converter, and the MRK1000), it never really worked even with the direct indirect sunlight (i.e. sunlight reflected from windows of the nearby building). However, we assembled the circuit at the north-facing windows. See the spotty reception below:

We tried using some capacitors to mediate the charge build-up but to no avail. Finally, it was decided that since it had worked when we had shown the project during the class, that it would work again with direct (not indirect) sunlight. Thus, we found a suitable cardboard enclosure to put it all in, and secured it to the window.

To our satisfaction, the device started sending data to the server on MyDevices which Dan had made an account for. It has been tracking the data since we put it in.

http://128.122.6.159/

On the data, it means:

Channel 0 means time
Channel 1 stats the battery level (which we am not sure we measured properly , because we are not using those pins to connect our solar panel.)
Channel 2 is sending 1 everything he can